Graphics Card Uses Compression for Reducing Memory Bandwidth???
Posted by Sachin Garg on 1st October 2005 | Permanent Link
ATI Technologies Inc., has announced the introduction of its new Radeon graphics card.
It claims to use 3Dc compression technology to bring out fine details with minimum memory usage and HyperZ for lossless Z-Buffer compression that reduces memory bandwidth by up to 25%.
A quick query at google revealed that compression is a crucial technique in saving memory bandwidth for higher performance and is very often used by graphics cards.
Can the reduction in memory bandwidth really help so much so as to offset the CPU-time cost of compression/decompresssion? Although it comes as a surprise to me, it sure seems it does.